Where was Trump on 9/11?

Donald Trump on his campaign plane Monday. None of the planes registered to Trump or his businesses were in Florida shortly following the 9/11 attacks.

A source tells Crain's that the Republican nominee was in Florida—not New York, as Trump claimed—when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center

Whenever a source claims to have the makings of a blockbuster story, my ears perk up even as my BS meter climbs to 11. That was the case recently when a source told me she knew where Donald Trump was on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was not, as the presidential candidate claims, in New York. Trump said at a rally in November that he watched from his Trump Tower terrace on Sept. 11 as people jumped out of the World Trade Center—four miles downtown.

The source, who did not want her name used because she feared being targeted by Trump supporters, saw his remarks and offhandedly said to her daughter-in-law: "Well, I know he didn't see that happening from his window because he wasn't even in New York. He was in Florida with Neal and Tolly."

Her friends Neal Travis—founding editor of the New York Post's Page Six—and his wife, Tolly, were at Trump's Palm Beach getaway, Mar-a-Lago. The source says she knew this because Neal called her from Florida after the attacks and asked whether there was any information about when planes would be allowed to land in the city again. Neil said, "Here's Donald; talk to him," she recalled to me last week. "Then I just heard this brusque voice going, 'Have you heard anything?' And I'm thinking, 'Why are you asking me?' I told him the same thing: I saw something in the [New York] Times about easing up on plane traffic."

The article she saw, published online on Sept. 13, 2001, announced that commercial air traffic had resumed that morning "on a case-by-case basis." If Trump were in Florida on 9/11, Sept. 13 would have been the first day he could have returned to New York. Indeed, the first visual evidence I've seen of Trump in New York City post-9/11 was on Sept. 13, 2001. He gave an interview near Ground Zero to a German television station.

Crain's looked into the source's claim, but Neil Travis passed away in 2002 and we were unable to reach Tolly, who the source said does not remember the details of that day clearly. We compiled a list of aircraft owned by Trump or his businesses and sent the information to a flight-tracking company. The firm told us that none of those planes were in Florida at that time.

Journalists have exposed Trump's lies during the campaign. New Yorkers rightly take umbrage at the idea that he would tailor the history of those days to advance his own narrative about himself. But previous reports of Trump being in Chicago on Sept. 11 have been discredited. And definitive evidence proving that he was not in New York on that tragic day seems to be as elusive as info showing that he was.